How to Engage Your Facebook and Other Social Media Site Fans

Social media marketing companies utilize sites like Facebook or MySpace to generate news or feeds through their fans. Frozen Frogs has found a way for social media marketing users to have a more effective presence on Facebook and other social media marketing websites. The Italian digital media agency lists five ways to get your fans to actively participate in discussion on your company’s page without engaging in random chitchat or idle banter. Here are some tips for fans to effectively contribute to a company’s page:

• Novelty is interesting. By asking your fans for suggestions on what they would like to see from your business, you get an idea of their likes and dislike and what piques their interests. However, it is important that fans are assured that whatever they contribute or say will not generate negative feedback. If your fans openly discuss your products or services, the conversation will encourage other users to suggest fresh ideas that will help your social media marketing results.
• Who doesn’t love promotions and discounts? Offering cash rewards is a great way to boost both your social media marketing and search engine optimization profiles. Give fans points for every purchase or create a bartering system for your fan community to get them talking about the products and services you offer.
• Go green. In the world of search engine optimization, eco-friendly companies get more hits because today’s consumers are environmentally-conscious. Companies that minimize their carbon footprints generate a positive response from its customers and fans.
• Do something remarkable. A lot of social media marketing companies are out there, but for a company to stand out, it should be able to accomplish something that no other search engine optimization (SEO) company could. Unique services and special promotions or events are pleasant surprises for fans, and can help increase their engagement with your company.
• Involve the community by letting them participate in videos or events that will require their services. Search engine optimization (SEO) websites can encourage their fans to partake in product testimonials, special events, or other company-driven promotions. Emphasize your need for their help for this project to push through.

Cybertegic Welcomes Lori from The Well Connected Mom

Cybertegic welcomes guest blogger Lori Cunningham from The Well Connect Mom!

From Lori's "About Us" section:

Lori has two wonderful young children, ages 3 and 6. As a mom, Lori is always looking to find new ways technology can help her with her over scheduled life. She started the WellConnectedMom.com to share her passion for technology with other moms who love technology or may be intimidated or less enthusiastic about it. WellConnectedMom.com reviews gadgets, websites, and other technology products to decrease the learning curve of using these products and increase interest for moms.

Lori has a master’s degree from University of Southern California (USC) in Communications Management (Technology) and a BS from University of California Riverside in Business (marketing). She worked for Nestle USA for twelve years in sales, brand marketing, IT, and e-business marketing consulting.

From a parent's point of view, Lori's blog posts are filled with insightful, relevant, and useful content about the latest technology. She does the research so busy parents don't have to! Go to www.wellconnectedmom.com/blog to learn the latest about iPhones, gadgets for the modern mom, and much more.

Look out Lori's review on Windows 7 tomorrow!

Social Media Marketing tip: Get Retweeted Fast!

Retweeting, or “RT,” is one of the most commonly used commands in Twitter. Basically, to retweet is to share someone else’s post with one’s own Twitter community or network. Having a post retweeted is recognized as a huge complement as it increases your reputation, and boosts search engine optimization (SEO). For social media marketing experts and search engine optimization users, here are some tips to be successfully retweeted:

• Viral and social media marketing specialist Dan Zarrella has proven that including links in your tweets is a great way to get retweeted. 56.69% of retweets contain links. Links offer your followers a direct path to the source, increasing your credibility and reputation.
• Because of Twitter’s 140-character limitation, you should shorten links with bit.ly and ow.ly. Both url shorteners provide tracking, history, and Twitter account preferences.
• Leave enough characters to be successfully retweeted. Give sufficient room for your followers to retweet. Keep in mind that retweets often include the username of the original user, so allow at least enough space for that.
• People are always curious about what things look like. Draw people in by incorporating images in tweets. Successfully leading users to the image being discussed guarantees a boost in being successfully retweeted.
• In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), the use of key words and phrases cannot be stressed enough. Some commonly used keywords to get retweeted are “you”, “Twitter”, “please”, “retweet”, and “social media.”
• Post interesting, original, and breaking news. By giving followers interesting tweets, they will be more likely to share your tweets with others. Avoid “game”, “going”, “haha”, “lol”, and “hey.” These are often useless words. Furthermore, tweets should be brief yet attractive enough for followers to retweet them.
• Punctuation marks matter. Tweets usually incorporate periods, commas, colons, and exclamation points, etc., but statistics show that the semicolon (;) is essentially “the least unretweetable punctuation mark”, says Zarrella.
• Twitter is a highly intellectual microblogging site. Social media marketing experts and other businessmen use Twitter, so by using words with longer syllables and characters, you trust that your followers can understand your message. Avoid emoticons and abbreviations.
• Friday is when the most important tweets are posted. Additionally, posting afterhours is also an effective time to get your message across.

Utilizing Social Media Marketing For Presentations and Conferences

Presenters, lecturers, and speakers often engage in social media to improve the relationship they share with their audience. Speakers can get feedback at a faster rate through social media marketing and search engine optimization. Facebook and Twitter have been transcendental for information sharing because they allow presenters to create backchannels where audiences can input their feedback and suggestions. Some ways to effectively utilize social media for presentations include:

1. Engage your audience and encourage them to actively participate through social media marketing. Event and conference organizers utilize social media for attendees to communicate pre- and post-event. By using social media marketing tools, presenters have an idea of what the audience would like to see and hear from the discussion. An anonymous audience instantly turns into a friendly and more interactive one.

2. A backchannel team helps. Backchannel tracks real-time conversation between the audience and the presenter. Request a colleague to monitor your backchannel during the presentation. Additionally, an extra hand could give audiences supplementary links and resources while the presenter tends to other audience-engaging activities.

3. Let your virtual audience know when your presentation is about to start. By giving them your Twitter username, for example, you encourage them to participate in your discussion. This assures them that backchannels are certainly welcome to join.

4. Key points should be brief and tweetable. Social-media friendly key points are a must especially for your virtual audience. Keep your key points short and clear and allow enough space for your username. Social media marketing, tools such as Add-ins and Keynote Tweet, aid in presentations by publishing tweets when you click on a PowerPoint slide or Keynote.

5. Focus on your backchannel when doing presentations and do a blow-by-blow account of how it was done. Share the results of the backchannel to demonstrate the validity of the feedback which will show your audience how the presentation was received. Through this, you can study the negative and positive points of your discussion.

Written by Marie S.

Deals with Google and Microsoft Bing Help Twitter

Although it’s routinely mentioned with Facebook as perhaps being the face of social media marketing, one of the more pressing problems that Twitter has faced in its relatively short lifespan is the one of user retention. While new users were signing up for accounts with Twitter at record speeds, at its worst, the social media marketing platform retained only 30% of its users beyond a month. However, recently announced real-time search deals with both Google and Microsoft’s Bing might prove to be the social media marketing platform’s saving grace.

In addition to providing Twitter with a stream of revenue that’s reportedly worth millions of dollars per month, it should also bring in a wave of traffic from searches conducted by users of Google and Bing regarding recent news and current events. As Mashable founder Pete Cashmore phrased it, “Google’s real-time search is essentially Twitter.”

With Tweets appearing as results in the major search engines, new prospects for networking, finding new ideas, and social media marketing become more readily available, perhaps providing enough incentive for users to stick around.

Written by Kenny K.

SMM News: Twitter Pockets Profits for 2009

Twitter continues to make waves in the social media marketing realm by reporting record profits – for a site that hasn’t rolled out any advertising. Critics can stop asking how the microblogging service can ever turn a profit because Bloomberg reports a $25 million revenue for the social media marketing platform. Even without advertising, the search deals the social media marketing platform finalized with Google and Microsoft are worth $15 and $10 million, respectively. This isn’t pocket change!

Twitter can’t expect to make such ground-breaking deals every year but it can’t be undervalued for these deals as well. The microblogging site’s influence on our social media marketing needs is growing with each day. Bloomberg’s article even notes that executives of Google and Microsoft both agreed that “their search sites would be considered incomplete if they didn’t include the millions of messages that get posted on Twitter every minute.” So how can the social media marketing site that revolutionized 2009 continue to generate revenues? Especially in an effort to continually roll out new features (i.e. re-tweet, geolocation, and big business tools) –which will involve an increased R&D budget.

Unfortunately for users, an advertisement-free Twitter will see its demise in 2010. Twitter has revealed plans to initialized advertising programs in the coming year and will begin charging for commercial Twitter accounts.  The charge for commercial accounts will include a tool for analyzing tweet traffic and possibly other features. However, no matter how they approach the advertising game, Twitter intends on making this transition very “organic” in the sense that they don’t want advertisements to disrupt the way users use the site. Ideally, Twitter will implement advertisements in a subtle manner.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter plans to make this a subtle transition and if users will agree that it is “organic.”

Written by: Daisy K.

3 New Google Search Functions in Development

Even though search engine giant Google is coming out with its new algorithm after the holidays, it doesn’t stop them from helping users by optimizing their search engine results page. Google currently has three innovative ideas in the works that is going to revolutionize search. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, gives details in an interview with UK Telegraph about the new three functions: Translated search, Social Search and Personalization, and Intuitive Search.

Translated Search

Although information may have been inaccessible due to language differences, Google is developing a tool to help overcome that barrier. Mayer described the translated search function as a software that would not only present the results in the user’s native language, but also translate the entire page if the user clicked through one of the links. This tool is intended to help open up and expand our horizons by providing users with a translated page that they could read/understand with ease.

To access Translated Search, click on "Show Options" and select "Translated search."

Social Search and Personalization
Personalization is the key idea behind this tool, says Mayer. Google is trying to make search results as accurate as possible, but also provide an individual experience. Facebook has recently allowed indexing with Google, meaning people are able to see updates and information if the users’ privacy settings are ‘public’. Twitter has also recently been incorporated in search results engine pages (SERPs) as mentioned in yesterday's post. Mayer believes that it would be ideal to be able to search for your friend’s updates. This personalization also crosses Google’s recent announcement of enabled web history regardless if you are signed in or not. Although this may bring up concerns about privacy, Mayer explained that people can easily opt out and that cookies merely contain information, not the users’ identity.

To access real-time search, select "Show options" and click on "Updates."

Intuitive Search
Once again, Google is going above and beyond and changing search as we know it. Although it sounds quite far-fetched, Google’s intuitive search, which is aimed at determining and suggesting what the user is looking for before they even begin to search. Mayer explained that we already have information readily available on our computer via side wiki or browser (i.e. Google Chrome).

Mayer believes that her and her team are close to achieving what she calls ‘omnivorous’ search, which is taking the user’s context of where they are, what they are reading, and so forth. Google is going to determine what you want, before you even want it.

Source

Written by Chris C.

Yahoo to Incorporate Twitter on SERPs

Starting Thursday, December 17, Yahoo will begin to incorporate the latest Tweets into searches. This is to follow in conjunction with Bing and Google as they have also begun to incorporate Tweets. However, Yahoo!’s algorithm determines the hot topic and will show in a separate section within the search engine results page (SERPs) called “Tweets”.

The latest buzz is about social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter being incorporated into major search engines like Google. Microblogging tools such as Twitter have become essential for social media marketing (SMM) because they are a tested and proven tool to help promote goods and services.

Expect to see even more Twitter action as major search engines battle it out to be on top.

Written by Chris C.

SMM News: Twitter Introduces New 'Contributors' Feature for Businesses

Lately, Twitter has been an integral force for businesses as a means of social media marketing (SMM) by helping companies expand and deepen their relationships with customers. With this growth comes the need for more business specific features, as evidenced by Twitter's recent assimilations with social media sites Citysearch and LinkedIn. Yesterday, Twitter’s official blog has announced a beta feature for businesses called “Contributors.”

Contributors is a feature to help create a more authentic engagement with customers for businesses with accounts on Twitter. This feature allows businesses with multiple users to add the specific username that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.

Below is Twitter’s explanation, as well as an example, of the Contributors feature:

“The feature we are beta testing is called 'Contributors' – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor's username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”


Since this feature is still under development, Twitter is allowing some businesses to test the feature out and try to receive feedback from the users.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, this may be Twitter’s expansion due to their exponential growth. Contributors is only one of several business features that will soon be readily available for businesses to use. Currently, some of these features are in beta testing and will be visible by all users, and some that will only be visible internally by businesses.

Since this is only the first of several features, Twitter has only begun to step up its business game. If you’re using Twitter for your social media marketing (SMM), make sure to stay tuned for any future updates on the business features.

Written by Chris C.

Social Media Marketing Trends in 2010

As 2010 approaches, there are several trends that are becoming concerns for anyone involved with social media marketing (SMM). One of the growing concerns for marketers is earned media, which is the added, unpaid exposure a brand assumes when consumers share about the brand online. Thus, agencies are looking for ways to create objectives for all their paid online ad campaigns.

As we’ve mentioned in our previous posts, search sites such as Google will include real-time content in their search results from social media giants Twitter and Facebook. In addition, search results will also include information from social network friends, as well as results and collective information from other web users to make searches more relevant to the user. As these trends grow, there will be more opportunities for ad support. Furthermore, although there are some ads already running, expect more personalized ads that are determined by your Facebook profile data and social network profile information.

Twitter has shown enormous growth over the last year to about 18 million this year, triple the amount of users from 2008. However, one of the biggest questions in relation to Twitter is what business they intend to build from that, and more importantly, if it will succeed. Of course, there has already been discussion about the possible revenue sources such as corporate accounts, celebrity authentication, and a temporal search function. Since the most realistic source is the temporal search, expect one in 2010.

Another concern is the debate between media companies concerning digital content. There are companies that range and/or switched from charging fees for content accessibility to free, though ad-supported content. Some sites are debating whether to continue or try the paid-content option. eMarketer predicts consumers will endure paid systems and digital media will be largely ad-based.

As technology advances, we are bridging the gap between Internet and TV. In the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES), companies will introduce televisions with Internet connectivity or direct access to YouTube or Netflix so consumers will be able to view online videos directly without going to the computer. Some electronics, such as the Xbox360 and Playstation 3, have already integrated Twitter and Facebook, so direct feed with electronics may be a rising concern for the social media marketing (SMM) group.

With 2010 approaching quickly, will your social media marketing (SMM) tactics be ready for the growing trends?

Source

Written by Chris C.

2010, the Year for Internet Video Marketing.

As online video continues to grow, it is important for both you and your company to understand how video can be a great source for social media marketing (SMM). A recent study conducted by comScore in October 2009 has revealed that more than 167 million viewers watch videos in the U.S. This means that there is great potential for video marketing next year because videos allow customer interaction, building brand awareness, and encourage viral sharing (as mentioned in previous posts, i.e. Bing and WillItBlend?). Thanks to advancements in technology and growth of the Internet, it’s never been easier for creating marketing videos and being able to share through social media marketing (SMM).

Of course there are certain rules and tips to follow to make your marketing video effective. For example, it is important for the video to be thorough, yet concise. The best average time would be under two minutes, but 30 seconds would be even better. Also keep in mind that music should be kept to a minimum and simplicity is key. Below are more detailed tips on using videos to improve your business.

· Videos on Your Website – The simplest way is to embed videos, using YouTube or Vimeo, onto your website. Also, be sure to add a ‘share this’ feature so that others can share the video through social media, such as Facebook or Twitter.

· Selling Through Videos – Companies such as Mashable and Jivox have reported increased sales through online video. There are also services such as Wistia that provide statistics on the way viewers interact with your video.

· Online Video Ads – A research about online ads has indicated that 52 percent of people who have watched an online video ad took action, such as researching for more information about the product.

· Show and Tell – With the use of online video, you can now tell and show your customers your product. You will now be able to inform and show them the benefits and how to use your product, thus establishing more value for your product.

· Mobile – Mobile devices are wildly popular, thus making it imperative for your video to be adaptable for multiple devices such as smartphones.

Bottom line: online videos are great techniques for your social media marketing (SMM). Online videos are only going to grow from here; so it is vital that you and your company has laid down a strategy for online videos in terms of social media, PR, and marketing.

*Below is a viral ad just released by Epson, with game footage courtesy of Electronic Arts Inc., of a mobile man taking gaming to another level called Extreme Gaming. The video was just released yesterday and is receiving hundreds of views per hour.


Written by Chris C.

Integrating Social Media and Bing for SEO

Though Google has the market cornered in terms of search engine optimization (SEO), search is always changing and social media is on the rise. One of the major newer players in the search engine world is Bing.

I’m sure you’ve seen their viral ads about search overloads and how Bing intends to simplify and make searching easier. Although Bing and Google have different algorithms, both try to provide high-quality and relevance search results in their search engine results page (SERPs). Both search engines also provide a navigational panel next to the search results for search options. One of the most notable differences between the two search engines is that Bing tends to separate results into categories for a more refined search experience. Below is an example of a search using Bing.

As you can see with using Bing, it’s more crucial to get into the SERP that has the most relevance to you and your company. However, it should be duly noted that search engine optimization (SEO) is still exactly what it is, SEO. As you can see from the image above, Bing’s interface is helping users by refining their searches more quickly and easily.

Good, or effective, social media marketing (SMM) is a great way to create buzz, provide links, and refer traffic. SMM sites, like Facebook and Twitter, are on the rise and are almost a community on their own. Although you may already be a part of the community, it's important to understand why and how it can be beneficial to you.

Facebook’s personal newsfeed can only be read by the registered user and is blocked from search engines results. As the community continues to grow, it becomes more and more crucial for your website and/or related page about your company to be included in Facebook’s search and feed.

As for Twitter, it’s caused quite the buzz as a means for communication and social networking. Even though Twitter may be a tool for social media, it can be quite the social media marketing tool and does retain SEO value. If you start to create a stir and people view your tweets and links posted, this can possibly lead people to visit your site via Twitter. Thus, this can improve your rankings and is an SEO advantage.

Conversely, it should be noted that it is important to share quality content when using social media sites. Providing fresh and valuable content along with adapting to the ever-changing SEO algorithms will help you be at the top of your game.



Written by Chris C.

Hootsuite. Your One Stop Shop for Social Media Marketing.

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a staple in today’s world to share news and stay connected with the world. Social media have also become quite popular social media marketing tools for businesses. However, Hootsuite, a third-party application, is here to help integrate those social media sites and make life easier.

Hootsuite is all about simplifying things, as well as providing useful tools to help make things easier. Below are several reasons as why Hootsuite may be the social media marketing tool for you.

• Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – Hootsuite has recently updated its features and allows its registered users to add social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. In additions, Hootsuite has gone a further step by allowing users to view their Facebook newsfeed and fanpages.

• Multiple Accounts – Not only are you able to manage multiple accounts from different platforms, but users are also able to add multiple Twitter accounts. I’m not referring to just a couple of Twitter accounts. With Hootsuite, it is possible to add two, three, or even ten Twitter accounts. Hootsuite is an effective tool for social media marketing by allowing the user to select a single, multiple, or all accounts and update simultaneously.

• Ow.ly – Hootsuite has its own URL shortener, like Bit.ly. Hootsuite has also announced new features, such as pictures, file sharing, and video capabilities (coming soon).

• Stats – When using Ow.ly, Hootsuite allows you to view the data on the users clicking the links you posted, referrals, and regional stats. The Stats page also provides data on the most popular links you posted so that you can try to continue posting similar links.

• Schedule for Later – This unique feature allows the user to schedule a ‘Tweet’ or status to be updated later. This feature can be quite useful because it works like a draft and allows you to make any changes necessary before being posted.

• Interface/Web-based – As mentioned above, Hootsuite allows for multiple social media marketing sites to be managed all on one page. Hootsuite allows for customization using multiple columns and accounts on tabs. Below is a photo to illustrate an example of what Hootsuite looks like.


Of course those are only to list some reasons for using Hootsuite. You may discover other reasons to use it such as the upcoming iPhone app, Hootlet, or the Twitter list option. So if you currently have one, a couple, or several accounts, take a look at Hootsuite. Hootsuite is here to make you social media marketing life easier.

Source

Written by Chris C.

Google and Personalized Search Results

Search engine giant Google has recently announced that they have started to personalize search results for everyone, regardless if they are signed into a Google account or not. Let’s say someone was searching to purchase a book using Google and found a listing from Amazon. Over a period of time, as the person continues to search for and click on Amazon links, Google will learn that you prefer Amazon over other online retailers such as Borders or Barnes & Noble, and thus tend to show more search results from Amazon.

Of course, people involved in search engine optimization (SEO) have no need to be afraid of this change. Google still wants the user to have full search access to the world, but just have some more personalized results once enough data has been recorded when the user is searching from something in particular or local. ‘Go Google it’ is the popular phrase if someone doesn’t know something or wants more information. This modern day is the information era and people will have several searches and click on a variety of sites to find the best information to help fulfill their need for information.

With this new update, people are going to have personalized search results regardless if they are signed in or not, which means that there are different features for both. Below is a table that lists the features for both users that are signed in and those who are not.


In previous posts about Google adding additional features to help users, this update is trying to help users improve their search results by customizing their searches from their location and previously recorded search results.
As you can see from the last feature, users both signed in and out are able to disable the personalized search results. The history feature is similar to the already-available option in browsers such as Internet Explorer and FireFox. If you are signed in, you will already be able to see the option to choose ‘Web History’ in the top right hand corner.

As I mentioned, SEOs don’t need to worry because Google does want to keep diversity in search results. Although they are trying to provide users with a more personalized search experience, they are not limiting the vast and endless world the internet has to offer.

Written by Chris C.

Are You Doing Your Keyword Research on Twitter?

We enjoy innovations to the social media marketing game. There is no doubt that social media marketing has been a great game-changer in terms of customer interaction and branding. However, we must all admit that we’re always seeking new tools to better calculate how social media marketing is benefiting our business.

Keyword research is an integral aspect of search engine optimization. Without the proper keywords, we’re missing out on potentially crucial web traffic. Now with the promise that Google may begin indexing our tweets, the concept of keyword research for social media marketing is in the limelight. Did you know you can track a keyword within a Twitter List?

Twitter lists have been a fascinating advent, with plenty of people jumping aboard to find new users to read or enjoying the benefit of being listed. There has been plenty of buzz about what you can do with these lists, but here’s a new one: keyword research. Create a Twitter list that includes all the users who tweet about the topic you’re interested in. If it is search engine optimization, create an alert for the term on ListiMonkey, which will send you an email notification of the keywords usage on the list.

We’re sure that better tools will be introduced that will revolutionize our views of social media marketing now. For now, this is a wonderful tool for keyword research to see what your tweets should include. Not to mention, you can use your findings and apply it to your search engine optimization efforts for all non-Twitter pages.



Written by: Daisy K.

Social Media Marketing: Do You RT?

The latest sensation about Twitter is the new “retweeting”, or RT, feature available on your Twitter account. Basically, the ‘retweet’ feature, a clickable option located at the end of someone’s tweet’, allows the user to automatically repeat that post with the ‘RT @’ prefix. However, this feature wasn’t available on Twitter before but via Tweetdeck, a social media client that tracked feeds from sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

The ‘retweeting’ function is a vital part of your social networking strategy and can boost your social networking status when you share viable information.

As we all know, Twitter has become quite the social media sensation among social media networks. I’m sure you’ve also seen clickable ‘retweet’ links or social media sites that have Twitter incorporated as an application like in Facebook. This integration of Twitter with multiple social networks allows you to take full advantage of your social media marketing by ‘tweeting’ once and having it being shared simultaneously on the other shared networks. This not only maximizes your social media marketing and exposure, it can help make your profile seem less like a vehicle for advertising.

Of course, with the benefits come with a cost as well. When ‘retweeting’ information, pay attention to the tweets and relay those that can give you more exposure, whether it relates or not it relates to your work. Also, another tip is to thank users for relaying the information, which also allows for more exposure for your brand.

Retweeting news that is relevant to your work shows that you are establishing your boundaries as to what category of information you are feeding to your followers. People who search for a topic that you’ve posted about may end up becoming your follower because they found what you posted was relevant and helpful to them.

Don’t be afraid to join in on the retweeting. Twitter is all about socializing so get in on the conversation.

*Hopefully you noticed that we also added the Tweet/Facebook share function on our posts. So feel free to share to those social media sites!

Written by Chris C.

Yahoo Partners with Facebook while Microsoft Copies Twitter

We’ve seen several cases of search engines and other social media marketing platforms incorporating Facebook or Twitter in order to revitalize and reinvent their images. While Twitter has made partnerships with Bing and Google, Yahoo is looking to partner up with Facebook and its 350 million user strong user base.

Yahoo’s main motivation is Facebook Connect, one of the most popular and preferred universal log-in tools on the web today. Yahoo announced today that it will start implementing Facebook Connect on several of the sites it owns. This means the social media marketing tool will be integrated on Yahoo’s Mail, News, Sports, and Finance sites, as well as the popular Flickr. Facebook Connect will allow users to leave comments, share stories, and view their Facebook friend feed right on Yahoo.

This is a big boost for Facebook Connect, as Yahoo is the #2 ranked search engine and is visited by tens of millions of users internationally. It’s also great news for the search engine who has been trying to make its image more “social,” especially with its new campaign. Hopefully it works out in their favor.

Another interesting story in the news is that Microsoft has revealed a Twitter copy-cat platform in China. The service they call MSN Juku allows users Windows Live Messenger contacts to exchange messages through 140-character messages. MSN Juku has a different interface and offers game play for its users, but the basic idea behind the service is more or less a rip off of the popular social media marketing tool Twitter. Right now, MSN has no plans on rolling out the service internationally.

It’s tough being innovative and capturing the internet world’s attention these days. It’s no surprise that established internet authorities like Yahoo and Microsoft need to incorporate the innovations of social media marketing phenomenon like Twitter and Facebook.

Written by: Daisy K.

My SEO Search Rankings Dropped, But Why?

There isn’t a surefire method for staying on top of rankings. Search engine optimization leaders continually tweak their methods to account for fluctuations due to Google’s changing algorithms or other varying factors. Especially now that Google Caffeine’s implementation is looming over the search engine optimization world, it’s no wonder that bloggers are worried that their pages may drop in search engine results or disappear altogether. We’re going to cover some basic search engine optimization guidelines and tips for when your rankings drop.

First, don’t panic. Fluctuations in search rank occur frequently, for better or worse. When you see your rankings drop, this isn’t a call for action to initialize a major search engine optimization overhaul for your site—chances are the traffic will return after a period of time, i.e. a few weeks. If you don’t see a nearly full return in traffic after an extended period of time, then make more tweaks to your search engine optimization efforts.

Second, make sure you diversify where your traffic is coming from. Simply focusing traffic on a blog or a single website can be hurtful to your rankings. This can include traffic directed from social media marketing platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Another factor to consider is Black Hat activity. We all want traffic driven to our site, but search engine giants like Google frown on manipulation and bending of the search engine rules. You’ll be banned from search engine results until you clean up your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and apply for reconsideration to be reinstated into the results.

SEOmoz has also confronted the issue of an indexing cap on Google, meaning there is the potential that not all pages on your site will get indexed. While Google downplays this fact, there is a “cap” on the number of URLs that will be indexed from a site. This has stemmed from duplicate content on pages that Google now flags as abuse. But likewise, SEOmoz stresses that you should diversify traffic to your site and make your content better and “stickier.” Provided you follow all the rules and have great content, Google will reward you for your efforts.

Written by: Daisy K.

Google Confirms Caffeine Update Now Live on One Data Center

Google confirmed last Friday on the whereabouts of the single data center where Matt Cutts said Caffeine would go live first this holiday season before a full roll out sometime in January of next year.

The data center where Google caffeine's update is now "live 50% of the time" is 209.85.225.103.

Major changes to the SERPS on 209.85.225.103 have been reported on a few threads: DigitalPoint Forums, Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld.